Japanese Mega-Retailer BEAMS Finally Goes Global(-ish)
The beauty of BEAMS is its scale. As one of Japan's most powerful retailers, BEAMS is fully stocked with excellent imports and craveable would-be exports, though very little of the latter ever goes global.
Until now. Sort of.
BEAMS America is finally going permanent, having popped up on West and East Coast USA a handful of times in the past year or so. Well, not permanent in the sense of an American BEAMS flagship store — never say never! — but for the first time in BEAMS' five decades of stylistic domination, it's directly selling its wares to the west.
Normally, when you wish to purchase stuff from Japan, be it clothes or collectibles, you have to pay a third-party proxy service to handle the ordering process. This is primarily due to international shipping being a tremendous hassle for Japanese businesses, especially smaller ones, but also cultural norms and retail customs.
And with proxy services being so ubiquitous — one is embedded into BEAMS' Japanese site — it's uncommon for even a retailer of BEAMS' scale to bother expanding internationally. Most Japanese businesses aim to serve domestic customers.
But the BEAMS America project is here for good and, with it, comes the dedicated BEAMS America website, where you can shop a selection of in-house products and collaborative gear, like special Levi's jeans.
It's admittedly not nearly as expansive a selection as the Japanese BEAMS site, where you can scroll through about a billion rare goods made by and for BEAMS.
However, that'll soon change. In a press release, BEAMS described a forthcoming selection of "Art and culture drops" and third-party brands like technical businesswear brand Teatora and sneaker company OAO. Nothing will beat the awesomely overwhelming experience of shopping a Japanese BEAMS store but this is a pretty good alternative.
"There wasn't really a strategy behind the breadth of BEAMS' offerings," a BEAMS America representative told me earlier this year. "It was more like, if somebody within the company wanted to explore a certain thing, they would start an original brand. Everyone is a nerd about something."
Finally, American clothing nerds can get their BEAMS fix from the source.
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